02 March 2007

What did they fight for?

So you risk your life for your country, for freedom and your local RSA has a few pokie machines that you like to put some money in from time to time for a bit of fun as you sit with a beer with some mates of yours. You’ve looked into the eyes of danger, maybe even directly into the eyes of those who would strip away what freedoms we have for the sake of racial superiority, the great people’s revolution or the emperor. You know how to handle your own money, shit, you handled a gun or even a plane or a boat. You can look after yourself, you helped look after the whole country and its allies. However few bother to give a damn.
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People like the snivelling little upstart who is the gambling inspector. Maybe he was some young whippersnapper, dressed smartly in his Hallenstein’s suit, with his nasally whiny voice pointing out how your RSA doesn’t have a gambling licence and had failed to pay the problem gamblers levy (you can’t remember the last time anyone there had an addiction, except for Jimmy but hey it was only when he had had a few, and was remembering his best mate who he had to leave for dead). Looking into the eyes of that little bastard, what does he know? He wouldn’t even get his shoes dirty, and I’m sure he’d cower if you threatened to punch him.
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Maybe he was in his 50s, one of those who is just a bit too young to have been in Vietnam, with his grey shoes, his polyester suit, large tufts of hair either side that he wets and pulls over his bald spot, sneering and officious with no respect. He thinks you’re just a bunch of gun loving old bigots, and don’t understand your responsibility to society – what a bloody arsehole – never worked a productive day in his life.
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Both of them are the sorts I thought I’d fought to avoid, like the joyless telltale at school who ran to teacher because someone was smoking behind the bikesheds. Sticklers for rules, couldn’t turn a blind eye to those who did more for the country in one week than they will in a lifetime. No respect. No fucking respect.
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Like Director of Gambling Compliance, Mike Hill – Director of fun regulation more like. How about the prosecuting lawyer, Mark Woolford, wonder what sort of kick he gets out of prosecuting an RSA and removing a source of fun for its members. He doesn’t believe that they have private property rights though and that people who gamble take the risk themselves on the RSA’s property. It doesn’t matter as he gets paid far more than the members even did. I wont blame Judge Lindsay Moore, though he didn’t need to have the machines forfeited – they do own them after all, not the state, though give him his due for discharging the manager without conviction. He was just doing his job.
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That Green MP Sue Bradford is into all this though, remember her, the one who went to Maoist China, the same government whose soldiers would bury our guys standing up in holes in the ground to be prisoners in Korea. What does she know,

01 March 2007

Helen Clark confronts food miles

It's about time and I'm very pleased, but more needs to be done. Publicity is needed in the UK on this, it is still almost invisible that there is more to carbon emissions than how far food has travelled. For every day you delay, is another day when UK media bleets on this lie, like it has today here, here, here and here.
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Amazingly, a green oriented site has actually started to talk a bit more sensibly about this quoting the Lincoln University study.
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How about the Nats having a policy?

The rail network is worth what?

Stuff reports that the Crown Accounts now show the rail network as being worth a ridiculous $10.6 billion, as this would be the replacement cost if tomorrow there was no rail network and you wanted to start from scratch. Imagine if Telecom's "value" was the replacement cost of its network?
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Of course, nobody would pay $10.6 billion for it, the government paid $81 million for the Auckland network and $1 for the rest, and the total value of TranzRail/New Zealand Rail was never close to a billion dollars when it held the lot.
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Cullen doesn’t even believe it is realistic. You couldn't charge track access charges to recover a bank deposit rate of return on an asset valuation like that, minus maintenance costs.
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The appropriate value should be the market value – what would the government get if it sold it off, which would be, in many cases, the scrap value of the track and the sliver of land the network is on. You could make a bit out of the rail corridors in Auckland and parts of Wellington, but most of it would be a marginal addition to farm land. The value of the asset as a railway is only reflected by how much rail companies would pay to use it, and it is unlikely to be very much (with little left behind after you cover the cost of maintaining the track, signals etc).
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The value of the rail network is as a sunk asset in most cases. Nobody seriously would build a brand new line from Napier to Gisborne for example.
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So how much of the Crown’s net worth is this sort of snake oil?

28 February 2007

Are you banned in China?

China, the great capitalist powerhouse of Asia is also the great censorship powerhouse. The freedom loving guys at Pacific Empire have an excellent post on this, including the link to the Great Firewall of China website - where you can check to see if your website or blog is banned in the People's Republic of China. Pacific Empire is, this blog is not as of ... right now.
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However if you go to my blog through the firewall and THEN connect to Pacific Empire there doesn't seem to be a problem. Technological barriers to censorship are, by their very nature, subject to many many holes.

Steve Jobs on TV and education

Julian Pistorius has an excellent post on Steve Job's views on TV and how public education has contributed to it... his basic points are:
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Most TV is of poor quality because most people want to switch off their brains.
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Educationists want technology to fix their problems, when the problem is people, incentives and unions and administrators that don't want to confront poor performance.
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He said "The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy".
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The full post Julian quoted from is here. As long as teacher unions continue to think that teachers cannot be paid and evaluated based on performance, they will continue to be defenders of mediocrity - and who in their right mind thinks all their teachers were equally worthy.